This document relates to electronic communication messaging.
Electronic communications, such as e-mail communications, have become prevalent in corporate, social, and other environments. Each electronic communication can include several components, such as addressing data, content data, and attachment data. The addressing data can specify one or more electronic addresses for one or more recipients. The content data can specify a subject of the electronic communication, and can include data related to the message, such as text data, image data, audio data, and video data. The attachment data can include files that are attached to the electronic communication, such as document files, video files, audio files, and executable files.
Often a sender of an electronic communication will address and send an electronic communication to the same group of recipients. Each recipient in the group must be entered for each of the multiple communications. For instance, in multiple e-mails sent to the same set of e-mail addresses, each recipient's address, e.g., e-mail address, and recipient type, e.g., a “To”, “cc” or “bcc” recipient type, must be individually entered for each email. Additionally, other component data may also be frequently included in such electronic communications, such as the same subject data, text, and/or the same attachments.
When electronic communications are frequently sent to the same group of recipients, entering this data can be a tedious and repetitive task. Thus, many electronic communication programs allow a user to manually create “groups,” e.g., a set of associated addresses identified as a user-defined group that a user may select when addressing an electronic communication. Creating and maintaining such groups, however, can be time consuming, as users must manually create the groups and specify the recipients, and the users must periodically update the groups to add and/or remove members. As a result, many users do not bother to create groups, and many of the groups that are created quickly become out of date. Additionally, creating such groups can be inefficient for such groups that are of temporal concern for the user, e.g., a group of recipients to which a user may send e-mails frequently for only several weeks or months.